The ChangingMinds Blog!

Becoming fearless

In London this week there were anarchic riots, with violence and looting
that probably cost the country far more in lost tourist revenues than the actual
damage done, though the physical restoration costs will no doubt run into millions. One reason
(amongst others) that people engage in such activities is the excitement created
through fear of being caught. One of the riots happened right outside my
daughter's apartment and she was beside herself with fear, but thankfully was
not harmed, though I fear it will create a persistent anxiety in her. My son
also has had his share of fear and was recently in Syntagma Square in Athens
with protestors all around him.

One of the distressing things about being human is the way that our fears can
effectively take control of our actions and ruin our lives. We fret about jobs,
money, anarchists and more.

Fears can easily become conditioned into us from a single incident, and not
just in childhood. A person hit by a swerving car may become terrified of
crossing the road. A person who is mugged may hate going out alone. A riot can
bring home the lawlessness that is just beneath many apparently civilized
societies.

One way to alleviate these event-driven fears is to use beta-blockers such as propranolol. Another way is to modify the memory of them,
working to to drain away the
emotion. This is easier than it may seem: think of how easily interrogation and
leading questions by police or lawyers can muddle and create false memories in
witnesses.

'Extinction' methods are based on conditioning and work by presenting the
person with the fear stimulus, but with no negative consequences. In time, people
re-associate the stimulus with no-fear. A problem with this is that fears can
creep back when the extinction is incomplete.

A particular principle is that memories are vulnerable to modification just
after they've been recalled. Elizabeth Phelps and colleagues used this principle
in an experiment where participants were first conditioned by associating a
coloured square with an electric shock. Later, extinction therapy was used, but
with one sub-group being reminded of the fear event six hours before extinction
work and another ten minutes beforehand. In the six-hour group and for the
no-reminder group, the effects of extinction were showing signs of the fear
returning. Notably, however, those who had been reminded of the fear event ten
minutes before the extinction work showed no signs of fear returning, even in a
subsequent test one year later.

The explanation is that the reminder of the fear event brings it to working
memory and puts it into a 'labile state' where it is vulnerable to modification.

There are already therapeutic methods that do similar things in changing
distressing memories, for example the approach that asks the client to describe
an incident and then confuses the memory by pretending misunderstanding in
reflecting back distorted variations. It can also help by recalling incidents
and then immediately switching to safe thoughts. The secret, as in the research,
is not to do it just once, but to persist until the fear is extinct.

Your comments

In NLP there are 'extinction' methods which are reputed to be very powerful
in removing trauma. I have experienced one of them at first hand. It didn't
remove the memory that the incident occurred but the connected emotions that
followed. They also taught me how to run the method for myself.

For sure, as with most things, it requires a well qualified and experienced
person to decide which approach is appropriate and then to apply it properly.

Best wishes to your daughter and son. In today's world, and with your
guidance, I think that there is every reason to believe that, not only can they
be successfully treated for any trauma, but also that they might find added
value in the treatment.

Regards,

Graham J

Dave replies:Indeed, Graham. I've trodden the NLP boards and understand the extinction
patterns. NLP is largely a collection of 'things that work' with a core process
of 'modeling'.
Extinction
as a method originated in the field of
conditioning, on which NLP at times leans heavily.

Most fears come from "MSU" (Making Stuff Up); i.e., we make up what we think
will happen, what the other person will say, etc. Research dictates that 95% of
what we worry about never, ever, happens.